The marketing department for The Dark Knight Rises, the third installment in the latest Batman film franchise, fired their opening shot earlier today and it was a doozy. MTV.com reports that it started with some strange mumbling on TheDarkKnightRises.com:
When you go to the aforementioned site (or TheDarkKnightRises.WarnerBros.com), you hear a muffled chant that loops continuously. What are they saying? Some early speculation had the crowds shouting something about The League of Shadows, but over at SuperHeroHype, they apparently have the answer.
One of the site’s forum members used an audio editing program to determine that the audio says (in spectrum) “#thefirerises” – which eventually led people to Twitter due to the hashtag-looking text.
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That led to a Twitter account called @thefirerises, which for every person who follows it, adds the person’s avatar to a mosaic of Tom Hardy as Bane, one of the film’s villains:
Click to see full-screen. Some people were able to extract the source code for the image; a sharper version is available over at MTV’s site.
The idea of looping a mystery into a marketing campaign for a Batman movie may seem obvious — Nolan is known for spinning mysteries and Batman is known for solving them — but it’s also really smart. The nature of the director and the characters involved has made it such that even seemingly obvious reveals about the plot have been questioned. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the marketing crew take advantage of the speculation and use it to keep people guessing.